Modern storage systems are being increasingly called upon to store and manage ever increasing amounts of data. As the amount of data increases, more and more big data applications are being developed that would like to concurrently access significant amounts of this data for analysis and processing. This puts an ever increasing burden on the storage system to not only be able to store the data, but to provide access to larger and larger amounts of the data with minimum amounts of delay. The storage system is also expected to provide backup and redundancy so that failures in portions of the storage system do not result in the loss of data. The storage system may also provide high availability to the data so that periods of high demand do not unduly impact the responsiveness of the storage system.
As more and more big data applications are developed, ever improving big data storage systems are desired. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide improved storage systems capable of supporting big data and big data applications.
In the figures, elements having the same designations have the same or similar functions.